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What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

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Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#481

Post by mediego »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #467
camkego wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve honestly wondered about this since those two 737 Max crashes. How on the earth did they design in a non-redundant single point of failure, such as the single angle of attack sensor as in the 737 max? (if this type of component is typically redundant) But if, “the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing for just five years”. It might explain how such a design decision happened. Would be re…

I also don't understand how you can accept to do this job if there's almost nobody there with enough experience. "Well I have to make ends meet and don't want to look for a new job, so YOLO". What's going through these people's mind today? Especially those who worked on that non-redundant system? They just shrug it off and say "well stupid managers made us do it", or do they feel remorse, responsibility? I genuinely…

I’m going through something like this, though in a _much_ lower stakes industry. On one side, management always seems to say the right thing to counteract my fears of mediocrity. And then months later a major problem needs fixed in production. I guess I’ll keep going like this until a problem is big enough that it can’t be fixed.

But they treat me well. And my last job was in a different industry that’s known for treating employees badly. So I stay. Again my job is very low stakes but it still eats me up, I can’t imagine how these engineers feel.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#483

Post by bumby »

shiroiushi wrote: post #469
bumby wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the irony of good QA. 1) Company starts to notice a lot of quality problems. 2) Company institutes a good QA program. 3) Company notices less quality problems. 4) Company cuts QA program because there seems to be less need for it. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. (The same can be said for safety when dealing with low probability events).

This doesn't explain Microsoft though, as that's probably a special case. They simply eliminated the Windows QA department, and instead let users do the QA. Why not? It's not like their users are going to switch OSes.

I don’t know about that specifically, but I’ve seen that as a common occurrence as a cost cutting measure in low risk situations. In that case, the risk is low because 1) it’s not safety critical and 2) the switching moat is large enough to ensure they don’t lose customers

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#484

Post by rybosworld »

twojobsoneboss wrote: post #384
rybosworld wrote: post #209

U.S. companies have a management problem. I specifically mean that the terminal career path for most professions is "management". Depending where you work, management can mean: - giving orders - delegating work (usually this is work the manager specifically doesn't want to do themselves) - clearing blockers in front of your employees That the third one is the rarest is a problem. American corporate culture has devolv…

Have you been in upper management? It is stressful and if things don’t go well it’s quite likely that you’ll get canned, vs an IC Grass is always greener

I admit that I've not and so in that regard, I'm speaking from the perspective of an outside observer. I have worked in middle management before switching back to IC for personal satisfaction reasons.

If I had to guess, this statement that I made is the one you are honing in:

> American corporate culture has devolved into: get promoted into management and coast.

Generalizations are what they are. There are always exceptions etc. And I fully recognize that there are talented, hard-working managers out there.

But, what I'm specifically getting at is that American corporate culture encourages far too many cooks in the kitchen. Managers are necessary. But I think most corporations have far too many. And part of that is because it's the norm to promote your top IC's into management. Eventually the structure becomes top heavy and overly bureaucratic.

To be honest, I don't think what I'm describing is particularly original/surprising.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#485

Post by giancarlostoro »

class3shock wrote: post #269

"But the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing just five years, according to a longtime Boeing executive who is involved in various efforts to save the company; for comparison’s sake, he says the average employee assigned to the 777 program had between 15 and 20 years under their belt." It don't think it's possible to overstate how bad, and sad, of a state of affairs that is. I've never seen…

I've been in software projects where the most anyone had under their belt on the team (outside of the managers) was maybe 4 years. It was bad. they were charging Senior rates, over promising and under delivering. The web stack was proprietary so very poor documentation, and no StackOverflow, you literally couldn't find anyone with literal experience with the stack in our town.

What's worse is I saw them turn away actual senior developers left and right. I suspect some fishiness with their hiring practices, but its been so long and nobody I ever worked with is there anymore.

I can't imagine actual engineering where people's lives are on the line. At least pull in some folk from elsewhere at Boeing and have them approve / disapprove of new changes / fixes.

I have to wonder if that entire line of planes is just doomed for the scrapyard.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#486

Post by isleyaardvark »

layer8 wrote: post #173
isleyaardvark wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they generally don’t tell a friend “if anything happens to me, it's not suicide”.

From TFA, it seems that it was someone else (still alive) who said that.

That was a widely reported quote from that Barnett said to one of his friends.

https://abcnews4.com/news/local/if-anything-happens-its-not-...

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#487

Post by FredPret »

bobthepanda wrote: post #393
FredPret wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the FAA should hire three engineering firms to go over the designs and manufacturing and have them compete to see who can find the worst flaws. Just having one big entity (FAA) check up on one other big entity (Boeing) leads to problems.

That would require another Boeing sized entity in the US, or a few of them.

If P does not equal NP, then you will ~always need fewer engineers to check work done by more engineers.

So you don’t need a Boeing sized company to check up on Boeing.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#488

Post by maximus-decimus »

makerdiety wrote: post #262
smsm42 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say it like "anxiety" and "stress" are synonymous to suicidal. I am a pretty anxious person, and sometimes have a lot of stress at work, and experienced burnout in the past too. That doesn't mean I am about to shoot myself in a motel parking lot - or anywhere else, for that matter. This binary view of mental health - either a person is "healthy" which means 100% perfect, or he's not - and then anything can be exp…

Stress and anxiety make you more vulnerable to bad decisions like suicide. Stop trying to turn stress and anxiety into an aesthetic personality trait and fashionable dress. Mental illness is not a dress that you can wear. It's toxic stuff to get rid of or at least mitigate.

People in my family have chronic anxiety across generation and I haven't heard of any of them killing themselves.

Nobody's saying it's an "aesthetic personality trait", just that it doesn't make you suicidal.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#489

Post by maximus-decimus »

chii wrote: post #410
mnau wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about being good for shareholders. They are far away and generally know nothing about what is good or bad decision in long run. We have replaced human QC with computers in many industries. C-suite cares about company profit, middle management cares about KPI. It's about maximizing individual management KPI despite being wrong for a company as a whole. Problems are for other guys/gals down the line.

> It's about maximizing individual management KPI so you could argue that those people setting the KPI is either incompetent, or they themselves benefit from such a KPI (at the cost of the company going down).

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” -- Goodhart's law

Could just be that chasing KPIs is inherently bad because people will game them no matter what.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#490

Post by gregw2 »

throwway120385 wrote: post #60
noahtallen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The companies are smart enough to learn from it. The problem is that in a late-stage capitalist market, companies have already grown so large that the easiest way to continue to grow profits is to cut costs as much as possible. It’s pretty obvious that in many cases, this incentive is entirely opposed to human health and flourishing. Sure, you can cut costs in consumer electronics like TVs without harming anyone. (As…

> The only way to counteract this frequently terrible incentive is by us people (the government) creating the incentives that work for society. That could mean huge, costly fines in these situations such that the only way to get money for shareholders is to make quality products, since what should be a market incentive has gotten so messed up. The US government could also get more aggressive about blocking mergers an…

Breakups help but are not a panacea to restoring competition if you let the re-emerge. See the “baby bells” in the US…
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